Smith Shines,
But Script Falters
In 'I Am Legend'

Rambling Plot Sinks
Tale of Man vs. Zombies;
Sluggish 'Kite Runner'

By

Joe Morgenstern

Updated Dec. 14, 2007 12:01 a.m. ET

So you're the last human being in New York City, maybe on earth. That's not good, since you're a social animal and you can hardly hang out with the hordes of murderous zombies who emerge from their tenebrous hives every night. On the other hand, you've got the city to yourself in the daytime -- no gridlock, no pickpockets, no bicycle messengers to dodge. Such is the plight of Will Smith in "I Am Legend," just as it was, essentially, the situation that confronted Charlton Heston and Vincent Price in earlier thrillers adapted from the same sci-fi novel by Richard Matheson. But the plight of the audience is this. The star, as solo practitioner, does a terrific job of holding our attention when we're not taking in surreal vistas of a deserted Manhattan that are fascinating in their own right. Still, zombies are zombies, and this nasty lot, mostly digital creations of variable quality, keep draining the distinction that the movie seeks and occasionally finds.

The cause of humanity's downfall was, we are told, a virus created by genetic tinkering in the course of cancer research. (In the Price film, the 1964 "The Last Man on Earth," it was plain old plague, while Mr. Heston's 1971 vehicle "The Omega Man" blamed it on a world-wide biological war. Times change, and movies scramble to keep up with them.) Will Smith's character, a military virologist named Robert Neville, has an immunity to the lethal virus, which has left the world's few survivors zombified, and for much of the movie Mr. Smith himself seems immune to the formula encroachments of the horror genre.

He certainly makes the most of what the basic plot device gives him: a dog to talk to, and to succor (far better an empathic pooch than Tom Hanks's volleyball in "Cast Away"); exercise equipment to work out on (the actor is in impressive shape), an assault rifle to shoot with (the targets of choice being wild deer and wilder zombies), the city as a theme park to explore, at one's peril, after the crowds have left. (In one of the most memorable vignettes, Neville drives golf balls onto city streets while standing atop one wing of the Blackbird spy plane that's parked on the towering flight deck of the aircraft carrier-become-museum Intrepid.)

ENLARGE

"I Am Legend," which was directed by Francis Lawrence, is more than a plot device. The story begins on a note of hope, and ends with a surprise. When the film flashes back to New York's last days and hours as a populated city, Andrew Lesnie's camera finds awful grandeur in the rising chaos. (The production designer was Naomi Shohan.) Neville believes, plausibly enough, that he can find a cure for the world's viral ill. As solitude and desperation take their toll on him, though, he takes on the demeanor of an archetypal mad scientist, and the film becomes a showcase for its star's dramatic gifts. (Mr. Smith also gets to do a charming imitation of Bob Marley -- the movie desperately needs his sense of fun -- in an eloquent scene about Marley as an artist with a virologist's approach to using art.)

But the herky-jerky script, by Mark Protosevich and Akiva Goldsman, favors vignettes and set pieces over dramatic development, and those damned zombies are everywhere, overwhelming the proceedings with their slobbering and howling. It's the end of civilization as seen by Edvard Munch.

'The Kite Runner'

When filmmakers decide to adapt a widely admired book, they assume a heavy debt load. Marc Forster and David Benioff, the director and script writer of "The Kite Runner," have discharged their debt dutifully, but without daring or passion. The film, set mainly in Afghanistan, makes a workmanlike stab at evoking that nation's recent, turbulent history -- from the last peaceful days of the monarchy through the Soviet invasion to the Taliban's malefic reign. (The Afghan sequences were actually shot in China.) And the boys at the core of Khaled Hosseini's first novel, wealthy Amir and his friend Hassan, the son of a servant in Amir's house, are touching at the outset, playing together heedlessly and flying their fighter kites. Yet their story of childhood devotion and betrayal never catches fire, for they're played by non-professional youngsters who act as if they'd been directed to concentrate on one emotional state at a time -- happiness, willfulness, devotion, submissiveness -- and had done their work all too earnestly.

ENLARGE

Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada and Zekeria Ebrahimi in 'The Kite Runner'

In a movie about a storyteller (Amir as an adult in America is played by Khalid Abdalla) the storytelling pace moves between deliberate and sluggish. Even the crucial scene, an instant of betrayal that leads to the hero's decades-long quest for expiation and redemption, proves perfunctory, though it's tasteful enough, if that's what you want from a depiction of ghastly predation. The only reliable source of energy is Homayoun Ershadi, a powerful actor who plays Baba, Amir's Westernized father. Indeed, Baba provides the film's first moment of genuine drama when he decides to defend a woman he doesn't know from a Soviet soldier who may well kill him. By that time, though, almost an hour has drifted by.

'Youth Without Youth'

'Youth Without Youth," Francis Ford Coppola's first film in a decade, starts with a literal coup de foudre -- a lightning bolt that strikes the hero, an aging professor of linguistics named Dominic Matei, and rejuvenates him after nearly killing him. Dominic, who is played by Tim Roth, finds himself beset by an anguishing paradox. He's now a young man with old memories and unquenchable longings -- to find his lost love, Laura, to finish the book that constitutes his life's work. What passes for a plot has the professor pursued by Nazis; his apparent immortality has intrigued Hitler's eugenicists. But the essence of "Youth Without Youth," which was shot -- luminously -- in Romania, lies in its solemn speculations about aging, time and consciousness. Mr. Coppola is one of the cinema's peerless masters, and I would have enjoyed nothing more than a chance to celebrate his new film. I'm truly sorry to say, then, that I found it impenetrable.

DVD TIP: The sine qua non of zombiedom remains "Night of the Living Dead" (1968) the low-budget horror flick that George A. Romero unleashed on an unsuspecting world almost four decades ago. Radiation from outer space is the reason given for a sudden wave of zombie attacks, but the main reason for the film's enduring popularity is its claustrophobic intensity -- two groups of people board themselves up in a small farmhouse to defend themselves against the slavering flesh-eaters.

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